


The Second Law

by Toft



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Episode Tag, Kissing, M/M, Season/Series 03 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-20
Updated: 2018-09-20
Packaged: 2019-07-14 14:25:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16042286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Toft/pseuds/Toft
Summary: John comes to say goodbye. Episode tag to S03E12, Aletheia.





	The Second Law

**Author's Note:**

> Just a little scrap to get me writing again! Thanks to emef for listening to me wail.

The day after Arthur dies, the first day that Harold goes back to the library, is the day John comes to find him. He gets his first real look at John unmediated by security cameras, and is dismayed; his hollow eyes and puffy cheeks would suggest the largely whisky-based diet of the last few weeks even if Harold hadn’t seen every receipt, each line on John’s credit card statement like a poison pen letter. John’s flight to Nebraska was a mixed message: the scrappy creation of a new identity – ignoring the five Harold had carefully crafted for him – with the steady tapping of Harold’s financial resources, so easy to trace that he might as well have emailed them. _You owe me_ , Harold had decided the message meant, _but you don’t own me._

But John is back now. Harold can watch him more closely. He’ll stop drinking, now he’s returned to the mission, and he’ll start eating properly under Harold’s eye. He’ll be well again in no time.

“Welcome home,” he says now.

And now John says, “I’m not staying.”

*

Six months before, John had tried to kiss him. Had kissed him. Harold was able to remember for a while what it was like – scratchy, a shocking softness, a brief exchange of breath – but he wore down the memory by repetition until it was a caricature of itself, edges blurred away into fantasy and doubt. After those few heartbeats of paralysis Harold had refused, of course. Of course he refused. And when he tried, belatedly, to find out the shape of what he had turned down, John refused to discuss it. And then he watched John drift away, towards Carter, as she made one dangerous choice after the next, and he threw himself into the problem of Ms Groves and the Machine. In retrospect, he seems to himself like a man glancing up from his phone occasionally at an oncoming truck, making no effort to step out of the way.

He takes a near-involuntary step towards John, then another. He sees John tense, as if to back away. His face is bruised. Lionel’s therapeutic methods leave a lot to be desired.

John’s fingers were cold, and he had touched Harold’s face so carefully. Time has a strange way of collapsing between himself and John; when John kissed him, it was as if Harold held in his hands again the bomb between himself and John’s beating heart, and the sensation distracted him for a few crucial seconds, during which time his own palm pressed against John’s chest, as if it had been there ever since; during those seconds he learned the rise and fall of John’s breath. One of his many mistakes. Now, he can never be as sure as he once was that John is breathing.

*

Harold wants to be sure that John is breathing, will continue to be breathing, and John wants to touch him. In this moment of clarity, Harold can tell that John has never stopped wanting to touch him. John always leans in, he is only ever barely stopping himself from collapsing forward into the force that pulls them together. In this moment, that force is tangible enough that Harold can admit that it is there, that his physiology has partly shaped itself around resisting it. If he gave into it, that second gravity, he would lose his balance and have to learn again how to stand and walk.

“I came back to protect you,” John whispers.

Harold’s throat is tight. He wants to say, _let me protect you, now._ But they both know he will ask John to walk into danger again and again.

“John, you can’t go.”

John is not visibly breathing. Harold takes another step forward.

John is easily pulled into the orbit of heavier bodies, easily pushed out. Which is not to say he is weak. He is light, fast – a scalpel rather than a hammer, as he put it to Shaw. It’s why he’s survived so long. Harold is heavy and slow, but he is close enough now. John comes to him, closer, close, pulls him into a bruising embrace. His mouth is on Harold’s and – this is what it was like, just like this –

“Don’t do this now,” John whispers, between hard, biting kisses, as if Harold was the one who – “I lost a friend. She mattered. Your Machine doesn’t care.”

“Stay,” Harold murmurs. Their foreheads are pressed together, he can breathe the same air as John. “John, I need you to stay.”

“I _can’t_.” John kisses him again, lingers, opens his mouth against Harold’s and strokes his tongue against his lower lip, as if he were going to keep kissing him forever. He tastes of whiskey. “I can’t stay.”

“Stay,” Harold says, words spilling out of him, “We could have this, John, I was wrong, I could try -”

“No,” John whispers, and kisses him again, as misery threatens to stop Harold’s heart. “Fuck you, Harold.”

“ _I_ care,” Harold says. He thinks he has a tight grip on John’s arm, but John manages to slip out of it, all the same.

“The Machine doesn’t care about anybody,” John says, “It cares about everybody. Isn’t that what you taught it?” He’s breathing hard, as if he’s been running. His face has some colour, at last, but his eyes are fever-hot. “I don’t care about everybody, Harold. I only care about one or two people. Seems to me we’re incompatible.”

“I didn’t want to jeopardize the work,” Harold says, brokenly. “That was all. We can’t always get what we want.”

“I wouldn’t know about always,” John says. “I thought maybe I’d get it once.”

“I could give you this – if you still want it – unless you meant, Carter - ”

“Forget it,” John says. He rubs his forearm over his eyes. “I can’t stay.”

“John -”

He’s gone. Time has collapsed between them again; perhaps he has been gone for weeks. Harold sways, and thinks about how to stand and not bend.


End file.
